You had an accident. It was a bad accident. Youhad head injuries. And you have problems remembering things.

What things?

Everything.

In Before I Go to Sleep, Nicole Kidman has Leonard Shelby disease; she awakes every morning having no memory of the past few years; her mind has refused to form new memories since she was brutally attacked years ago by unknown assailants. Colin Firth is her long-suffering husband & Mark Strong is her sympathetic psychiatrist. But things are not as they seem. What is her husband hiding from her? What is her psychiatrist doing by treating her secretly? What are these strange flashes of memory hinting at? And what really happened on that night all those years ago? Well, I’ll answer all of those at once: nothing all that interesting. This kind of movie is right in my wheelhouse, but this one just never coheres. Strong and Kidman are fine, neither as good as I know they can be. Firth is very good; it’s apparently impossible for the man to give a bad performance. But the big reveal, when it comes, makes no sense. The solution to this mystery doesn’t just strain credulity, it snaps it right in half; there is no plausible way that the events posited could have happened in a million years and even if they could have, the character motivations make no sense either. There are a few nice flourishes, particularly involving a camera on which Kidman records messages for herself to watch the next day and Firth has some good acting moments, but on the whole, this is just one to skip. Recommended against. 2 stars.

tl;dr – mystery boasts a few nice moments, but the idiotic solution is anti-climactic and more than strains credulity. 2 stars.